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ColorMunki 1.0 problems
By Rick LePage | May 2, 2008
Over on his thinbits blog, Dave Camp has posted a lengthy review of his initial experiences with the $499 ColorMunki Photo, which just started shipping.
To summarize, the product was a complete failure for me on multiple machines and multiple printers and I cannot recommend it to anyone. My friend has problems as well, so there is definitely something wrong with the product as a whole. The only thing keeping me from returning it at this point is the promise of better software this week. X-Rite is known for having quality products, so it’s baffling as to why they shipped the ColorMunki in this state.
We recently received a unit as well, and our experiences out of the gate pretty much parallel Dave’s, especially with respect to profile building. We’ve been assured by X-Rite that a Version 1.0.1 update — which will reportedly fix some of the bugs we’ve run into — is imminent, and we’ve frankly been holding off on writing our review until that ships. We doubt, however, that the update will fix Dave’s (valid) complaints about the user experience aspects of the ColorMunki, specifically in providing help on printing with ColorMunki-generated profiles from different applications.
X-Rite doesn’t ship the ColorMunki software with the unit – the CD that comes in the box contains a stub application that directs you to the X-Rite Web site, where it downloads the most current version of the software. That will be great for those people who purchase a ColorMunki after the software update is released (assuming it fixes most of the current problems), since they won’t have to install Version 1.0, but it doesn’t help early adopters like Dave.
If you’ve purchased a unit, but haven’t yet set it up, you might want to wait a bit before taking it out of the box. If you have set it up, you should probably wait for the update to be released before doing anything with it. (The ColorMunki software has an Auto Update feature that should let you know when the update is available.) We’ll keep you posted.
Topics: News |